The Bay of Fundy Ecosystem Partnership will soon have an environmental health index (EHI) for the area stretching between the U.S. border and the Musquash Estuary.
The aim of the BoFEP project is to establish a baseline from which to monitor environmental shifts and provide researchers and policy makers with a practical measure of ecosystem health.
Scott Kidd is the primary BoFEP researcher working on the project. “The index will help us set specific targets for management,” says Kidd. “If the Bay were to score lower than the global average, the number could help create a sense of urgency amongst both policy makers and the public.”
In 2013, BoFEP held a workshop to discuss the various EHI methodologies in order to determine which one would best suit the Bay of Fundy. Participants recommended the Ocean Health Index (OHI), a peer-reviewed method that has been successfully applied to over 200 other coastal zones. The OHI provides a framework for assessing the status of environmental indicators (or goals) and grading each with a numerical score. The individual goal scores are then added together to produce an overall score for the area.
In January 2015, BoFEP received funding from Environment Canada’s Gulf of Maine initiative to pursue five goals including sense of place, food provision, coastal livelihoods and economies and biodiversity. Individual goals require a great deal of information in order to determine the current and future status of the goal. For example, researchers need to know the current number of coastal jobs and likelihood that the number will remain steady over the next year.
Acquiring and interpreting data sets requires the assistance of numerous outside sources, and the data used to score goals elsewhere in the world does not always line up with Canadian equivalents. “Even after the data is collected, the method requires a lot of complex math to score the individual goals,” explains Kidd. BoFEP researchers are now working to acquire the remaining pressure and resilience data needed to score their short list of goals by March 2016.
The first one is the hardest,” Kidd says. “But it’s worth it. Developing an OHI for this area will allow researchers to distill information into an answer that is both simple and easy to communicate. By making the format more accessible, we hope to improve the quality of future decisions about the Bay of Fundy.”
For more details on this project download the following files:
BoFEP OHI Project (MS Word)
BoFEP OHI Project (PDF)
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